If you don’t know me, I am a huge Dragonball fan, I have an army of Goku toys (stopped keeping a count around the 50 mark) and have watched all of Dragonball/Dragonball Z and even GT numerous times. I am a biased hard-core fan I freely admit it. I went into this movie expecting it to be a terrible adaptation but was hoping it would at least be an entertaining action film. Sadly my low hopes were shattered…

Not so detailed spoiler – It is crap

Now I am going to go into detail so you don’t have to watch it. Don’t read on if you don’t want spoilers but if you go you’re in for the ultimate spoil. Your precious time and money. Really you shouldn’t pay to see this. It’s nonsensical crap.

Detailed Spoiler

I have no beef with the cast, they all try although Goku being the only white guy amongst all theses Asians looks horribly out of place but again, that’s not his fault. Now from what I’ve read, it is obvious James Masters has done wonders with Piccolo compared to how he could have been (he had to campaign to be greener and older) but the story and the action scenes in this are worthless. Yes we’re talking the Legendary Dragonball franchise, loved and hated for overly long fights and yet in this, the fights are few, short and un-impressively lame.

Where to begin, the begining of the film, a voiceover telling us how thousands of years ago, Piccolo and Oozaru arrived and rampaged around the Earth and nearly wiped it out. Piccolo was sealed and without his master, Oozaru vanished. Really that’s the best they come up with, he vanished? you’d think he’d go apes**t for revenge for his master but ok, lets continue…

Anyway from that begining we’ve already lost any hope of this being a good adaptation as that is pretty different from Kame coming to Earth and in order to become the Guardian of the Earth, purging himself from evil by splitting into two beings, the evil side of which became the Evil King Piccolo while the good became the Guardian of the Earth and created the Dragonballs instead of a group of humans.

Never mind the adaptation, at least the film still has a chance to be entertaining right?

We join Goku just before his 18th birthday and he is training with his Grandpa and is good at fighting but jobs out to to ki based projectile attack – yay that didn’t look too bad at all. So far so good, he’s an outcast at school and is the whipping boy. Now actually I have no problem with the school bits, sadly they turn out to be the least insulting or disappointing parts of the film even if they are completely out of character for Goku who never went to school and by 18 had already defeated an army single handedly and got engaged.

Back to the story and has a crush on a girl named Chichi and makes an ass of himself talking about her name after impressing her with his ki usage (in case you don’t know, the reason why her name is funny is because it means father in Japanese – obviously not really a name fitting a hot girl). Regardless, he gets invited to her party which leads to the most enjoyable part of the film.

Yes the highlight of the film is Goku slicking up his hair with gel only for it to comically go back to being spiky. Now that is a great touch to fans and funny to those who haven’t seen Dragonball.

At the party we get an all too rare action scene of Goku dodging the bullies’ attacks so they knock each other out as he’s promised not to fight. Fair enough we’ve already said it is nothing like the real Goku who loves to fight and it’s done well. Sadly while Goku’s out, Piccolo has not only freed himself (never explained, nor his henchwoman Mai), but he’s gone to Goku’s house looking for the Dragonball which isn’t there as Goku has it. Excuse me but what? if you have a radar, you go to where Goku is, if you don’t how the hell do you know to go to Grandpa Gohan’s house?

One laughably bad death scene later and Bulma attacks Goku because he stole her Dragonball. She tracked it with the Dragon radar (not its name in the film btw), obviously she’d been tracking Piccolo who stole hers but stopped looking when he left. Anyway they team up to find Master Roshi and the other Dragon balls.

It should be mentioned here that I have no idea where any of this film is set, the city they go to sounds Chinese but given how Goku and the other school kids are blatantly American I don’t know. I assume they got there by bike. I dunno travel throughout this film is confusing.

Anyway Master Roshi (Chow Yun Fat) tries in this film, but he’s handicapped by looking nothing like Master Roshi and by the fact the story is crap. They couldn’t be bothered to give him the Turtle Hermit moniker (he doesn’t even have a pet turtle c’mon that would’ve been an easy nod to fans). After a fight lasting less than a minute they all team up to go search for the Dragon balls.

Going downhill fast

From here on my memory gets fuzzy as I got increasingly angry with the film.

Roshi gives Goku a cargo net full of junk to wear as a backpack in a nod to the super tough training of Dragonball but this is where people who haven’t seen Dragonball (which shows Goku gradually building up his strength and speed) will get confused. To this point, Goku had never shown super human strength or speed, nothing that Tony Jaa couldn’t do anyway. From here, he is running alongside Bulma’s bike while carrying God knows how much weight on his back). The training montage is less than half a minute of that while they get to their destination and meet Chichi again. Days have passed in that time but you wouldn’t know it so they tell you…

So Goku gets invited to a martial arts tournament and they leave, go to a temple so Roshi can get a container to seal Piccolo which is explained badly. They head off and fall in a pit made by the bandit Yamcha. He ends up helping them and they drill a hole sideways from the pit into a cavern with rivers of molten lava – I kid you not molten freaking lava! How deep was that hole? Wasn’t so deep when Roshi casually jumped out of it. Back in the cave of lava, Goku fights a bunch of weak creatures created from Piccolo’s blood and defeats Mai in a dark fight that was super crap, she then gets away.

They all head to the tournament where Chichi displays some nice fighting skills against an undercover Mai who cuts Chichi to get a drop of her blood and then forfeits the fight, robbing us of a proper fight of any worth. Goku learns the Kamehameha (the buildup is done differently to the manga and anime and is a projectile not a beam booo but he’s only training I guess).

Mai uses her ninja skills to transform into Chichi and steal the Dragonball. The two Chichi’s meet and fight an all-too short fight that is rudely ended by Goku knocking out the real Chichi by mistake.

Piccolo summons a temple out of the ground. Goku, Yamcha, Roshi and Bulmer go to the temple where Piccolo will summon the dragon. Roshi stops Piccolo with a gold kamehameha and then almost seals him but the container is destroyed and he jobs out leaving Piccolo to explain to Goku how he won’t defeat him, but join him as his time is up. Goku is an alien, sent to earth and on his 18th birthday, Oozaru will leave the shell of Goku behind.

Losing the plot

WTF? wasn’t Piccolo after the Dragonballs to revive Oozaru? no he wants world domination with those. Frankly if you’re bulletproof and can throw fireballs and collapse buildings at will and have a gigantic ape at your command, I don’t think you need to wish for anything.

Anyway, Goku transforms relatively nicely into a giant ape named Oozaru, Yamcha saves Bulma then in a rare display of being true to character, jobs out to the ape in a single blow. Goku/Oozaru strangles Roshi to death only to transform back into a human on his own afterwards in a super anti-climatic finish. Did I mention anti-climatic, oh no, that would be the Goku-Piccolo fight. I have never been so disappointed in a fight as I was by this. Even if this wasn’t Dragonball this was shockingly bad and got me angry like no film ever made me before.

Most disappointing fight EVER

Goku and Piccolo trade some high speed punches, un-impressively crash through some rocks and then it’s the battle of Piccolo’s beam against Goku’s proper beam version of the Kamehameha. Now I should be happy it was a beam even if I hated how he said and performed the kame hameha but then Goku flies towards Piccolo while firing it which looks super ridiculous.

Even in Dragonball they know enough about physics not to fire a beam forwards while moving forwards yourself. In fact they had the perfect set up to have Goku use the same finisher Kid Goku used to defeat King Piccolo. All they had to do was have him launch himself off the ground using the Kamehameha but nooooooo, Goku’s first ever beam, goes through Piccolos (which Master Roshi’s couldn’t btw) and Piccolo loses. The whole fight was over in mere minutes. Ignoring the fact he could’ve wished his Granpa back, Goku summons the super un-impressively small gold dragon and wishes Roshi back to life and the credits roll. A third of the way through the credits, a woman is tending to a sick person, oh look Piccolo, wasn’t that a surprise seeing how they didn’t think to check on or finish him at all which is probably the closest to Dragonball they get the entire film LOL.

Conclusion

This film is not Dragonball, it doesn’t even try to be. They set it in a world without humanoid animals rending half the cast of Dragonball obsolete. They threw out Goku’s best friend Krillin and the remainder of the Z fighters as they will eventually be known.

If they were going for a franchise, they can only do the Saiyan Saga until they have the glaring problem that the Namek/Freiza saga can’t happen as there is no way to trace the Dragonballs to Namek as it wasn’t a Namek who created them, and there is no need for the Dragonball gang to go to Namek because if Piccolo dies, Earth’s Dragon balls will still work D’OH! That’s why you don’t go changing things unnecessarily!

Is it really that bad?

The original Street Fighter film was an insulting terrible adaptation, so is this. The difference between the two films though, is that was hilariously bad. It was entertaining in a cheesy over the top way. I’d rate the fights in that to superior to this sadly and that is criminal.

The first half of the film is pass-able but the 2nd half had my friend vowing to never watch it again. I’m sure in the distant future I will watch it again just because my memory will fade and I’ll think was it really that bad. It was and it will be again.

In closing

Please, do not pay to watch this film, in fact don’t even download it. Wait for it on rental or TV and don’t encourage a sequel. Dragonball was originally a retelling of Journey to the West, go watch the Forbidden Kingdom or even the old TV series Monkey. Both are more entertaining than this. This is sadly trying to hard to be serious when the original source wasn’t to begin with. The fights are not up to speed with the Matrix from a decade ago, never mind the source material or any one of a hundred Hong Kong films or even western martial arts films. If you are still thinking of watching this just out of curiosity, just know this – I warned you.

Tags: dragonball

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 6th, 2009 at 6:35 am and is filed under Reviews, TV & Movies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.